About PVBS : Success Stories

Case Study — Integrated Concepts & Research Corporation

PVBS’ Microsoft-based Solutions Help Alaska Native Government Contractor Capitalize on the Right Project Accounting and Project Management Strategies They Need to Best Maximize Their Contracts.

At-a-Glance

Company/Industry: Integrated Concepts & Research Corporation (ICRC), a subsidiary of Koniag Development Corporation, is a diversified technical and management services company that serves the US Government. The company’s core industry expertise lays in information technology, advanced vehicle technology, aerospace, engineering and transportation infrastructure. The company is an Alaska Native Corporation.

Champion: The Company’s Chief Operating Officer (COO) wanted a project accounting and financial management system that offered more than basic accounting functionality. He wanted a project accounting solution that made the company’s Program Managers more effective and positioned to manage their growing contract base more efficiently.

Critical Issues: ICRC owns many government contracts that are managed from numerous locations across the country. The company was hampered by a financial management software system that did not allow it to effectively share information from corporate headquarters to the program manager level. In order to best manage its contracts with the right financial data, the COO recognized that the company needed to provide financial information to Program Managers across the web on a secure self-service basis in real or near real time. The existing system was unable to provide this real time access. The company was also growing and needed a system that could scale as its contract volume increased.

Existing System that Needed to Be Replaced: GCS Premier from Deltek.

Strategy: “As a COO, in today’s business world of selling labor-related services, you can no longer have silos where systems don’t talk to each other, and not just in a software sense, but also process wise. Accounting must talk to Operations, etc. This system must be a critical financial management tool and not just an accounting system. The system must allow improved financial management of the company. It’s important for companies like ours to have a financial management system that supports multiple sites and programs.”

The company wanted to increase responsibility for the project’s financial management to the team leader or program manager level and knew that it could not be done without giving them the data they needed. Currently, it would take 5-6 weeks to make a decision since the program manager had limited access to the data they needed. Unfortunately, getting that data would be 5-6 weeks too late.
The COO said, “We couldn’t hold our people responsible for issues such as direct labor if you didn’t give them the project accounting tools to make a decision. If a project’s direct labor was dropping off, for instance, they wouldn’t be able to see the drop off without the proper management tools.”

The Result: ICRC, after considering older, less integrated and intuitive products, including Deltek Costpoint, chose Microsoft Dynamics NAV for Government Contractors provided by PVBS.

Said the COO, “There’s a tremendous amount of power when someone wants to know how much we are spending on a project and they can see it in real time. In the past, Program Managers would have to email or call an accounting clerk and ask for a project status report which distracts the clerk from his duties as well adds several layers of communication taking days to get a simple report. We could now give Program Managers the power to see where their projects were at any given time.”

Company management was convinced that where automation was not being used, it should be used. For example, prior to implementing the new solution, expense reports were done manually in Excel. The time and expense reporting capability built by PVBS as part of the solution offered a single point of entry for everyone and made workflow much more fluid. No duplicate data entry was needed, which saved hours because of the improved work flow of the automated tool; and less chance of mistakes made since data was only entered once. Said the COO, “The ease of use and ‘systems transparency’ has proven to be exactly what they had desired, with line managers now accessing the information they need directly. The enhanced value of the system gives line managers across the country more access to information quicker with views of project status in real-time. Now there is improved financial awareness down to the program manager level of a program’s status, which is what we needed.”

With the more fluid reporting, the company can now send email reports to vice presidents and division heads to get information flow out quicker. Also integrated business analytics tools help vice presidents and IT project managers go online and see how they’re doing before reports come out.

“We’re still finding ways to improve our process based on the system. The Dynamics NAV solution we acquired from PVBS is extremely flexible versus existing accounting systems on the market. It provides the flexibility to do what you need to truly see the possibilities. We are no longer limited by the system only the limits of our process, mindset and, ultimately, our imaginations and creativity on taking the mysteries out of financial management.”